Hasta La Gadget!

This keyboard is hideous, a piece of design so startlingly humdrum that, like the perfect spy, it could slip into your office and remain unnoticed for weeks or months. But Adesso’s AKB-440 has one extremely useful feature, especially in an age where almost everyone uses a laptop.

It has an integrated touchpad, along with a pair of mouse buttons, situated below the useless section which contains the “insert”, “page down” and “end” keys. The arrow keys have been shifted across under the, uh, shift key, laptop-style, to make room.

Now a mouse, with all its fancy buttons, might be more efficient than a trackpad, but once you get used to having one there at your finger and thumb-tips as you write, reaching over to grab the rodent starts to get annoying. I have a lovely old sprung external keyboard which is propped against the wall because I am so used to my MacBook keyboard and oversized trackpad.

And even if you love your mouse, there are times when you are surfing one handed (drinking a cup of coffee, I mean) that an integrated trackpad much easier. Hell, just scrolling a long document would benefit.

The $60 keyboard has one other great selling point. If anyone in the office does notice it, they’ll never steal it. It’s just too plain ugly.

Product page [Adesso via Business Wire]